Federalism and Progressive Resistance in America

The year 2016 may be remembered as a time when populism returned to power in the US. But it may also be remembered as the start of a new era of progressive federalism, when state and local governments led the opposition to Trumpism.

BERKELEY – The year 2016 was one of ascendant populism in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other developed countries. With income stagnation, faltering economic opportunities, and a loss of faith in progress fueling widespread discontent, voters backed candidates who promised to return power to the “people” and to shake up systems that mainstream political leaders had “rigged” in favor of a corrupt “elite.” In the US, growing ethnic diversity, smoldering racial tensions, and changing social mores added fuel to the electoral fire.

In the US, long-term erosion of trust in the federal government culminated in Donald Trump’s victory in November’s presidential election: even though President Barack Obama enjoyed high public approval, only 19% of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right. Given traditional Republican priorities, reflected in President-elect Trump’s cabinet choices, federal government programs (with the notable exception of the military) are likely to be slashed. Ironically, spending cuts for health, education and training, and the environment, along with large regressive personal and business tax reductions, will further enrich the “elite” while undermining programs that benefit the majority of households.

But the major social and economic challenges addressed by federal programs will not disappear. The responsibility to deal with them will merely fall more heavily on state and local governments, which will have to tackle them in innovative ways. Indeed, the answer to Trumpism is “progressive federalism”: the pursuit of progressive policy goals using the substantial authority delegated to subnational governments in the US federal system.

Laura Tyson, a former chair of the US President's Council of Economic Advisers, is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior adviser at the Rock Creek Group.

People in Hawaii and Oregon should familiarise themselves with Henry George and taxing land values. Those two States will be critical in be biggest fight for a just society we will see in our lifetimes. Successfully implementing a tax on land values in those States will facilitate a political challenge to Prop 13 in California and thereafter passage of the policy in the country's largest economy. After that, it will be only a matter of time before we elimate poverty by using the receipts of the tax on land values to fund a form of universal basic income.

With the world’s sixth-largest economy, a population of nearly 40 million that looks like the future of America, and a united and responsible Democratic government, California is a model of what progressive federalism can accomplish...........

Ya lost me right there, and you expose your bias. California is a slow motion train wreck. No housing in SF unless your a plutocrat. Businesses and the wealthy fleeing the state due to excessive taxation. A sanctuary state sheltering illegal aliens while flouting the Law. The best thing that California could do would be to secede.

One reason for the emergence of outsider Donald Trump is the old outrage that elites seldom experience the consequences of their own ideologically driven agendas.

Hypocrisy, when coupled with sanctimoniousness, grates people like few other human transgressions: Barack Obama opposing charter schools for the inner city as he puts his own children in Washington’s toniest prep schools, or Bay Area greens suing to stop contracted irrigation water from Sierra reservoirs, even as they count on the Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy project to deliver crystal-clear mountain water to their San Francisco taps.

The American progressive elite relies on its influence, education, money, and cultural privilege to exempt itself from the bad schools, unassimilated immigrant communities, dangerous neighborhoods, crime waves, and general impoverishment that are so often the logical consequences of its own policies — consequences for others, that is. Abstract idealism on behalf of the distant is a powerful psychological narcotic that allows caring progressives to dull the guilt they feel about their own privilege and riches.

Nowhere is this paradox truer than in California, a dysfunctional natural paradise in which a group of coastal and governing magnificoes virtue-signal from the world’s most exclusive and beautiful enclaves. The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the overregulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment.

Pebble Beach or La Jolla is as far from Madera or Mendota as Mars is from Earth. The elite coastal strip appreciates California's bifurcated two-class reality, at least in the way that the lords of the Middle Ages treasured their era's fossilized divisions. Manoralism ensured that peasants remained obedient, dependent, and useful serfs; meanwhile, the masters praised their supposedly enlightened feudal system even as they sought exemptions for their sins from the medieval Church. And without a middle class, the masters had no fear that uncouth others would want their own scaled-down versions of castles and moats.

Go to a U-Haul trailer franchise in the state. The rental-trailer-return rates of going into California are a fraction of those going out. Surely never in civilization's history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise.

"Coastal elites set rules for others, exempt themselves, and tolerate rampant lawlessness from illegal aliens. One reason for the emergence of outsider Donald Trump is the old outrage that elites seldom experience the consequences of their own ideologically driven agendas. Hypocrisy, when coupled with sanctimoniousness, grates people like few other human transgressions: Barack Obama opposing charter schools for the inner city as he puts his own children in Washington’s toniest prep schools, or Bay Area greens suing to stop contracted irrigation water from Sierra reservoirs, even as they count on the Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy project to deliver crystal-clear mountain water to their San Francisco taps. The American progressive elite relies on its influence, education, money, and cultural privilege to exempt itself from the bad schools, unassimilated immigrant communities, dangerous neighborhoods, crime waves, and general impoverishment that are so often the logical consequences of its own policies — consequences for others, that is. Abstract idealism on behalf of the distant is a powerful psychological narcotic that allows caring progressives to dull the guilt they feel about their own privilege and riches. Nowhere is this paradox truer than in California, a dysfunctional natural paradise in which a group of coastal and governing magnificoes virtue-signal from the world’s most exclusive and beautiful enclaves. The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the overregulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment."

...

"Pebble Beach or La Jolla is as far from Madera or Mendota as Mars is from Earth. The elite coastal strip appreciates California's bifurcated two-class reality, at least in the way that the lords of the Middle Ages treasured their era's fossilized divisions. Manoralism ensured that peasants remained obedient, dependent, and useful serfs; meanwhile, the masters praised their supposedly enlightened feudal system even as they sought exemptions for their sins from the medieval Church. And without a middle class, the masters had no fear that uncouth others would want their own scaled-down versions of castles and moats.

Go to a U-Haul trailer franchise in the state. The rental-trailer-return rates of going into California are a fraction of those going out. Surely never in civilization's history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise. "

The correct term is "illegal aliens", not "undocumented immigrants". Illegals have lots of documents... Ids from their own countries, stolen ids from Americans, etc. They are heavily documented, not just legal in the USA. An immigrant is defined (under U.S. law) as a lawful permanent resident of the U.S. Illegals are (wait for it), illegal.

This is fine as far as it goes, but lots of the market failures, externalities and income disparities that we wish to address can only e done (or done efficiently) at the Federal level Indeed, climate change needs to be addressed internationally.

This article is carefully written in Leftist code and it is dead wrong. Trump could easily disband the Bureau of Land Manage by stripping it of funding. He could then put that money to work elsewhere, such as the DHS and the Immigration Service. There are any number of large Federal Bureaucracies that can be and should be sacrificed for the greater good of these United States.

A few years ago, a number of states practiced “uncooperative federalism” by ignoring Civil Rights laws and maintaining segregation. It didn't work. Now “uncooperative federalism” is going to be used to protect illegals (yes, illegal aliens are illegal, not "undocumented"). It won't work either. States don't get to choose what laws they obey.

Luke Lea wins this. The range of opinion on PS is quite limited. The writers range from 'neoliberalism now, neoliberalism forever' to 'neoliberalism is having problems, but we have no idea what to do'.

all the progressives I know were very anti-federalism up until recently. It's like all of a sudden they think the federal government shouldn't run roughshot over states rights. they were super pro the federal government controlling the states when they thought Bernie had a shot at winning

Well, don't bite the hand that feeds you. Progressists were federalists in an attempt to lift the Midwest and rust belt, until they turned away and not only didn’t acknowledge the help the wealthiest states were providing, but are now tuning and challenging the progressive states.

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